Greece rejects Turkish claims ‘in their entirety’

Athens rejects Turkish claims set out in the maritime borders agreement signed last year between Ankara and the Tripoli-based government in Libya “in their entirety,” Greece’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Maria Theofili, said in a recent letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

Published on Wednesday and dated February 19, the letter is a response to the geographical coordinates submitted by Turkey to the UN on November 13, setting parameters under which Turkey could expand its continental shelf across the 28th meridian.

These coordinates, said Theofili, “unlawfully define the outer limits of Turkey’s claimed continental shelf, in stark violation of the international law of the sea and the sovereign rights of Greece in the Eastern Mediterranean.” Therefore, she added, they are “void of any legal consequences. They cannot form the foundation of any legal rights and cannot be invoked against Greece.”

Theofili went on to warn that “other illegal and provocative Turkish acts in the same maritime area, in complete disregard of Greece’s sovereign rights, as well as of those of other neighboring countries, seriously endanger peace and security.”

In the meantime, Turkey’s third drillship, Sertao, has set off from the United Kingdom and was heading to the Strait of Gibraltar on Wednesday. Turkish fighter jets also conducted 40 unauthorized overflights in the eastern Aegean.

"It's barbarism. I see it coming masqueraded under lawless alliances and predetermined enslavements. It may not be about Hitler's furnaces, but about the methodical and quasi-scientific subjugation of Man. His absolute humiliation. His disgrace"

Odysseas Elytis, Greek poet, in a press conference on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize (1979)